Three Poems

Words By Kelli Russell Agodon, Art By Arthur Asa

It never rains inside the hospital, but the families of patients are like snow geese in a flooded field. In one forest, a kingfisher dying. Do ravens still guard our kingdom? I don’t remember much except how the nurse was a mockingbird and the doctor kept trying to rebuild the nest. Where did I fly to when the doctor said, Your father has an unrecognizable word, morphine, unrecognizable word, his blood pressure is a flooded field, his blood pressure is sinking. Yes, it is raining, unrecognizable word, unrecognizable word. He won’t be coming home.

The man working on my back says, I’m concerned with your relationship to pain, he’s joking, his elbow baring down on some back bedroom in the house of my spine. He asks how it feels. I say, It’s a good hurt. But harder. Deeper. He presses a star in an upper galaxy and the heat of an astronomical object dies in my shoulder blade. He tells me he can trace the curve of what I’m made of, I ask him to get under my wingspan, press deep into the part of me that aches. Classical music plays in the background, I remember the violinist who left me in high school after a friend slid his hands inside me though I said no. How can we repair another lifetime? How can we break away from what we hold? There are certain times in my life I can see the threads in the fabric that hold me together. I want the scissors out of the equation, but when I cut myself from the garment, I love the sound of slice, the release. The man working on my back moves his thumb slowly down the edge of my vertebrae, says, We can heal this.It doesn’t have to hurt to be good.

I don’t have to remind you
of my sorrow, my father’s pocketwatch
found in a mist of dust,
still working the graveyard
shift. Now there’s time to tend the orchids
in the morning until death enters
the greenhouse to say if
she had lived, I wouldn’t be
here—one life leaves and
another arrives to replace it.
I don’t have to remind you,
my father’s diary was made of seeds
and suicides, postage stamps and wheat
pennies, time disguised as blossoms,
an open wound, blinkworthy, how quick
the watering can become a riptide.
Sometimes I remind you to choose
a card as if we’re cutting heartache
in half and putting it back together,
we’re here, dovelike and uncaged,
a ghost holding the door open
to the disappearing box and yet,
the ticking of the pocketwatch
without being wound, in these days
any magic will do.

Kelli Russell Agodon

Kelli Russell Agodon is an award-winning poet, writer, and editor from the Pacific Northwest. She’s the author of six books—most recently, Hourglass Museum & The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice. Kelli is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press where she works as an editor and book cover designer. Her next collection of poems will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2021. Learn more at www.agodon.com and www.twosylviaspress.com

Arthur Asa

Arthur Asa was born in Monterrey City, México. He speaks less and draws more every day. As it should be.